Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for January 26, 2017

Good morning guys!

Brush Spready returns!

Brush is looking fuller and fuller !

Is that Vista Bill I see going door to door ?

I wonder how the Brush would get a job looking like that.

Well, it was someone we’d all have recognized when viewed from the front.

“Kitchen/Brush” partnership.

So The Brush (aka Brush Spready) didn’t get blown to bits in a dynamite trailer after all it seems.

BTW – what kind of genius hides in a trailer full of dynamite?

Brush 101

The Brush (real name Jockie Lyceum) was a con man heading a phony charity to supposedly warn of the dangers of atomic radiation, claiming that exposure to fallout had caused his hair to grow entirely on his face. In reality, he was just wearing a rubber facemask. He was also a vicious, multiple murderer. Tracy caught and handcuffed him, but he managed to escape when lightning struck a tree that crashed onto the police car escorting Brush to jail. Brush sought shelter during the storm behind a construction van loaded with TNT when another lightning bolt hit the van, causing it to explode. All that was ever found of the Brush afterwards were bone fragments and his handcuffs.

The Brush’s first (and until now only) story lasted from January 23 to June 14, 1962 and is reprinted in Volume 20 of IDW/Library of American Comics’ Dick Tracy reprints.

The fact that the hair on his face is just a mask raises the possibility that this isn’t the Brush, but an imposter. Either way, the question is, why is he wearing the mask now while posing as a Hotel Siam plant worker? All it does right now is draw attention to himself. I hope Mike has a good answer to that.

Given that the “Brush Effect” was achieved with a facial toupee – and a slightly different one than is currently depicted – it might be someone borrowing the M.O.

Certainly, a crossover event is an odd place to reintroduce a relatively minor – and deceased – villain.

I’m not liking the new interface but the strip is fun.

Don’t see how it could be the original Brush, as Chester Gould left nothing to the imagination about his demise (including Sam’s bloody handcuffs hanging from a tree branch)! But that was a story I followed from beginning to end as it was originally presented, and loved every panel. I do appreciate Our Team following up on a promise made years ago that a lot of Gould’s stories would be revisited. We have Little Nottin from the 52 Gang still out there, plus Posie Ermine being recently re-introduced, and the mention a while ago of Haf-and-Haf being on the loose! Thank You, Team Tracy, for constantly keeping us interested!

…….hmmmm…..maybe it’s a certain celebrity with his combover REALLY grown out, lol

Off-Topic, but I’m pretty sure everyone here would want to be informed that actress Mary Tyler Moore has passed. :(

Wow, thanks Mike & Joe for taking me back to 62…TBC

Cousin It needing Rogaine?

If this the authentic, original Brush, where are the apes and why aren’t they doing most of the work for him?

Suddenly this afternoon, GoComics changed all the icons for various site functions to just plain open boxes. They must have put at least a little effort in to that, and for what? How is that an improvement? I have tried to go along with their new site without commenting much, but this latest move just seems odd to me.

I’m starting to think that the Spirit is one of the bidders, so that would leave only one mystery bidder, Hotshot Charlie’s passenger.

The details of what the Spirit is doing there have never been discussed and may be classified, but he may be bidding on behalf of the U.N. He mentioned being dispatched to Istanbul in one of his first cases to retrieve the immortality formula from Emil Petit when he got ambushed by P’Gell. That formula was supposed to be “shared with mankind.”

Brush seems to be full of Street Smarts, or at least what passes for pithy wisdom, but he badly needs a shave!

(I am in a way handicapped here, as I stopped reading the Chicago Tribune on a regular daily basis, and Tracy with it, around the early 1960s, reading it only intermittently and/or sporadically thereafter [in part because I spent the greater part of my time out of town or even out of country], until rejoining Tracy here when the new Team Tracy came on board. So I’ve missed a lot of the intervening stories and characters in any meaningful sense, having had only occasional glimpses of them. Nor am I so devoted a fan as to buy bound volumes of this strip or indeed most comics. I try to read each day’s strip closely for what it has to offer, but historical accounts I must leave to others and rely on their better recall or more serious connoisseurship….)

The present Brush could be a relative with the same ‘condition’ and degree of criminality.

The Great Am needs a better HR department when hiring. Jus’ sayin.